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Assorted thoughts ground finely!

Just As Long As You’re Not Paying Attention

Dear fellow Americans, particularly you on the left, but certainly not excluding my righty-tighties — hello. Recently I was forced to think (terrible practice, I know) when I saw during the DNC convention broadcast the song “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten sung by a gaggle of celebrities and the song “Confident” by Demi Lovato in celebration of the nomination of the first woman to run as a candidate for the office of President (that is, of course, as long as you don’t count Victoria Woodhull in the election of 1872. Though, to be fair, it’s understandable that no one thought to remember her since…you know…she’s a woman! [See, it’s funny ’cause it’s sexist eh-he eh-he])

GIF cred to Reddit user Badmonkey001

Anywaaaaaay, these songs got me to thinking about how their juxtaposition to the convention’s (forced) theme of unity is quite characteristic of the over-all problem with the Democratic party at the moment: There is a celebration of an atmosphere that doesn’t exist and contradictory positions.

There is a celebration of Hillary Clinton’s (alleged) femaleness and the fact that it means she is, as the DNC graphic showed, breaking that glass ceiling that has so long kept women down and oppressed (we won’t name by whom they’ve been so terribly oppressed, but it’s a binary system so I’ll let you guess – hint: it’s something that all the people who came before her in the video had in common). And so, during the convention, we get “willpower” and “rugged individualism” songs like “Fight Song”:

“And I don’t really care if nobody else believes,

’cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me.”

Then we get edgy, “willpower” and “looking out for number-one” anthems like “Confident”:

Is your tongue tied up?

’cause this is my ground

and I’m dangerous

And you can get off

But it’s all about me tonight

And what is the result? The DNC is marked by enormous division this year between Clinton supporters (i.e. the ones left in the arena after the Sanders supporters walked out) and Sanders supporters who feel more alienated from their Pro-Hillary Democratic base than ever because of the DNC email scandal. This, of course, necessitates the numerous calls for unity (from the failed religious fervor of the opening prayer to the attempt at insulting people into unity made by Sarah Silverman) so that every one can be cowed into feeling good about their demonstrably rigged nomination of a woman who was essentially called an idiot by the FBI (though we would have preferred an indictment) and her previous-president/first-man/ when-it’s-convenient husband who has been accused of rape and who was (gloriously) somehow scheduled to give a speech on the same day as the hair-trigger rape-caller, Lena Dunham. This woman is supposed to be a uniter and representative of the people?

Then we had President Obama give a sickeningly conservative speech in favor and support of Hillary Clinton, riffing on principles he doesn’t actually believe or, at least, hasn’t really done anything to promote.

“We’re still perfecting our union. We’re living up to our founding creed, that all of us are created equal; all of us are free in the eyes of God.”

And yet he is saying these things before the not-so-distant backdrop of Black Lives Matter movement protestors — the organization our president invited to the White House and set equivalent with the abolition and women’s rights movements — marching through the streets chanting “fry ’em like bacon! pig’s in a blanket!” and “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!” The President’s words were also trying to distract from the shock of government researchers at a dramatic increase in fire-arm, ambush-style, police fatalities during just this year.

And somewhere further back in the scene, there sits the ugly fact that during the time that it took for President Obama to give his DNC speech in support of Hillary Clinton, statistically speaking, 94 children were aborted under his anti-life policies (which Hillary vows to continue, if not more aggressively); and of those 94 children, 29 of them, an estimated 30%, were yet-born black children. This means that, in the 45 minutes it took for him to talk about the great good that Hillary Clinton is going to be for America, President Obama helped kill more black people than the number of black people shot (justifiably or unjustifiably) in 3 months by U.S. Police.

(NOTE: the statistics of Police shootings of black men are a difficult number to research accurately [you can start here], because, as the websites you’ll find complain, reports do not have to be handed over by police stations for public reporting. For the record, however, an annual statistic for U.S. abortions is a difficult number to acquire for the same reason [abortion clinics not having to report their numbers to the public], but you don’t hear many websites complaining about that.)

But, we’re supposed to cheer that Hillary Clinton, being a woman in support of increasing women’s “reproductive rights,” is going to further the reaches of legalized abortion? Is no one talking about the evidence of actual systemic racism in annual abortion statistics?

Is no one going to talk about the fact that the DNC and Hillary Clinton claimed support from the “mothers of the movement” who represented the black individuals controversially shot by police even though 6 out of 7 of the mothers on stage saw reasonable justice (in my opinion) for the murder of their child with perhaps the exception of Eric Garner:

Michael Brown (proven assault), Jordan Davis (officer charged with life in prison), Hadiya Pendleton (gang members shot an innocent girl and were indicted on multiple counts), Dontre Hamilton (man with schizphrenia who was victim of excessive force so that, even though the ruling was rightly self-defense according to the evidence, the officer responsible was fired from the force), Trayvon Martin (proven assault), Sandra Bland (forensically evidenced suicide)

Eric Garner – died of a heart attack after excessive force from an officer who, though not indicted, is under special FBI investigation. The Garner family also settled out of court for a 5.9 million dollar settlement.

When these women were brought on stage, it wasn’t with a broad explanation of all of the difficulty of the individual cases represented. It was assumed that the women on stage were all equally victims of excessive police brutality, which is incorrect. These controversial cases are the ones that the DNC brought before the U.S. as a sign of the racial reconciliation that Hillary Clinton will bring when elected?

Is no one going to talk about the InterCenter reports showing that, outside of Syria and Iraq, there has been 1 ISIS inspired/directed attack every 84 hours since June 8th? Since that’s just the ones reported and claimed, that is a minimum of 14 attacks in a little over a month and a half. Add to that the fact that those are just the attacks outside of the countries suffering from direct ISIS attack on a regular basis: Syria and Iraq.

On a related note, is no one going to discuss U.S. immigration in context of the rape-crisis going on in Europe right now? Is no one going to talk about how maybe we should be helping a people who show little sign of assimilating into American culture take back there own country rather than come into ours, our neighbors’, and our neighbors’ neighbors’ countries since the people who currently run the countries they are fleeing are generally agreed to be representative of a horrible ideology that actually commits the injustices to women, immigrants, and minorities for whom Hillary Clinton says she’s looking out?

President Obama’s answer:”By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than when we started.”